Keeping flooring and carpets clean and maintained can often be a time consuming and labour intensive task, especially for larger shared spaces with high-foot traffic. Failing to prioritise your flooring can lead to further unexpected costs down the line with the need to refresh, refurbish or even replace. This not only has a budgetary impact but also an environmental one, with 70% of carpet being sent to landfill instead of being recycled within the UK in 2020.
At a time when cleaning services are stretched, gaps in labour are growing and recruitment efforts are strained, here are five tips for quality flooring and carpet maintenance.
1 – Understand your flooring
Understanding the needs and requirements of your flooring can save workers from overcleaning areas that may need less servicing and allow them to concentrate their efforts on high-service, high-footfall areas. Flooring such as laminate is a minimal maintenance material and requires much less servicing compared to something such as carpet. Overcleaning can reduce the integrity of the material, drive up costs from wasted cleaning products, and divert valuable time of workers to areas that don’t need it. Knowing the requirements of your specific floorings can help save costs and drive more impactful work.
2 – Create a robust schedule
Similarly, creating a robust cleaning schedule not only stops you from over servicing but also helps drive focus to areas that need cleaning more or less frequently. Extending the life of flooring leads to both cost savings and environmental benefits. Ensuring cleaning staff stay on schedule is also of great value in fast paced, time restricted environments. As staff shortages grow in these areas of work, using existing staff in meaningful ways should be a top priority.
3 – Maintenance for if, not when
Preventative measures for helping preserve the longevity and durability of flooring and carpets mean acting on needed refurbishment as soon as it’s identified. This is especially prevalent in high-foot traffic areas as damage will only continue to worsen, leading to more work, more time and more spending. Equally, it’s beneficial to have a schedule or plan for inspecting your flooring to identify any damage or needed work. It’s always better to be ahead of the work needed than playing catch up.
4 – Support your existing workforce
Many businesses are facing the brunt of a crisis in labour shortages and difficulties in recruitment. This is why focus must be placed on supporting your existing employees to make sure they are happy, equipped and can perform their tasks to the best of their ability. Unequipped staff or staff that are stretched too thin cannot truly service your flooring effectively, resulting in mistakes or underservicing. New technologies and collaborate solutions are developing and becoming accessible, bringing in a new age of what it means to clean.
5 – Embrace new technology
Lastly, it pays to be proactive on technology implementation. Early adoption will show benefits much faster and help improve areas faster if done this way. Technologies such as collaborative robotic (cobotic) cleaning solutions allow for automation to deep clean your carpets while cleaning staff can focus on more prevalent and immediate tasks. Allowing for cobots to assist your existing workforce supports all four previous points, relieving staff of some of their time and labour-heavy duties and open pathways for upskilling and progression.
As demonstrated, flooring is a key component not only to the aesthetic and functionality of a space, but to so much more. Acting to maintain good air quality, providing an enticing and welcoming space to operate in and investing in your environmental footprint, flooring shouldn’t be an afterthought. There are advancements in solutions to help collaboratively support active current worker, which in turn benefit businesses and inhabitants of spaces. Let’s start putting flooring first.
Read more about the Whiz autonomous vacuum cleaner here